Perez returns to the cockpit in stealth Ferrari run as Cadillac tunes up at Imola
Sergio Perez quietly slipped back into an F1 car this week, logging two long days at Imola in an all-black, decal-free Ferrari SF-23 as Cadillac began knitting together its race-ops playbook for 2026.
It was Perez’s first time in an F1 cockpit since the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the end point of a bruising season alongside Max Verstappen that ultimately severed his Red Bull tenure. The next chapter is already written: Perez will spearhead Cadillac’s 2026 entry alongside Valtteri Bottas. The wrinkle is obvious — Cadillac doesn’t own any “TPC-legal” old cars — so the American outfit leaned on its future power unit supplier, Ferrari, to get its people around a live car and its driver up to speed without waiting for the 2026 mule to turn a wheel.
Ferrari ran the test; Cadillac watched, learned, and worked through procedures shoulder-to-shoulder with the Scuderia’s crew. In the garage, Ferrari chief engineer Xavi Marcos and Alessandro Fusaro led the programme, with Cadillac team boss Graeme Lowdon and team manager Peter Crolla observing closely from inside the same bay. And the driver? The Mexican wore a plain black suit and helmet to match the bare carbon SF-23 — the visual equivalent of a whisper test.
No official timing sheets were released, but Italian media on site clocked Perez at 93 laps on Thursday and 91 more on day two, all on Pirelli’s hard compound with pit stop practice folded in. Sources indicated the best lap dipped into the 1:16s around Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari, quicker than a 1:17.27 floating around on social media. Either way, the stopwatch wasn’t the point.
“He wasn’t even pushing,” Lowdon was quoted as saying by Motorsport Italy. “The test is just to train the mechanics and learn the procedures. There are still things to improve, but we are on schedule.”
That’s the tell. In an era where teams hoard mileage to validate setups and software, Cadillac’s brief was different: build muscle memory. Rehearse refuelling rigs (for the garage, not the car), pit gantry choreography, and the hundreds of tiny handovers that separate tidy from frantic on a race weekend. Mercedes did similar work last year to bed in Kimi Antonelli via TPC days; Cadillac, a newcomer to F1’s ecosystem, simply had to borrow a dance partner.
For Perez, the week doubled as a systems reboot. The afterglow from Yas Marina has long faded, and driving a two-year-old Ferrari might not tell him much about 2026 machinery, but it does remind the neck what 5G feels like. He even joked about that very neck on social media afterwards, the classic sign a driver’s enjoyed the sting. More importantly, he got the repetition: braking references, out-lap cadence, live procedures with a new set of voices on the radio.
The arrangement is unconventional — a Scuderia car with a Cadillac-contracted driver, cloaked in black — but sensible. With Ferrari supplying Cadillac’s power unit in 2026, there’s a pragmatic overlap in software, safety, and operational language. Watching how Maranello orchestrates a garage day is an education you can’t download.
And it appears to have gone without drama. No interruptions were reported across the two days. No headline-grabbing run plans, just the kind of repetition teams quietly crave in the off-season. By the time official pre-season running kicks off in Barcelona in January, Cadillac’s core will have at least gone through the motions once together rather than meeting a live car cold.
Lowdon underscored that stance recently on Beyond the Grid: the car itself wasn’t the point. “We don’t have a previous car. The car isn’t actually important,” he said of the TPC push. “We want the mechanics to get used to regain that muscle memory of working with a live car… What we want is an environment where the mechanics get used to each other, and learn everyone’s way of doing things.”
If anything, the Imola outing shows Cadillac is trimming the lag that typically dogs new entrants. You won’t find performance secrets in a 2023 Ferrari on hard tyres, but you will find rhythm. And rhythm is what Perez has always traded on: clean tyre prep, tidy racecraft, minimal fuss. In a project that will demand patience before the 2026 reset lands, that’s a useful foundation.
We didn’t get laptimes or a glossy photo dump — just a quiet affirmation that a dormant F1 career is awake again, and that a start-up operation is learning the ropes from a team that’s been doing this for nearly a century. For a winter test with no stickers, that’s a lot of signal.
